Down the Garden Path

This is not just a gardening book, it's a light-hearted, funny and entertaining Masterpiece Theater kind of account of a very English batchelor's attempt to create a garden paradise. I loved it and was inspired for my own attempts.

These books may be old but I can see why they are still in print!

The book arrived in condition as described and delivery was extremely fast, sooner than I expected since it was during the holidays - very nice since the book was a gift.

A thoroughly charming book with a lovely pre-war atmosphere. It is about gardening yes, less about the technical than about the wonders. That weird, ratty vine you chopped down to get rid of, which bloomed like the Dickens two months later, the neighbor who knows everything, has a perfect garden, and seems to stop by just when a mystery fungus has claimed your best plants during the night. It's that kind of gardening book, about the joy of success and the deceit of garden catalogues. Beverly Nichols bought his house for the garden he thought was there. He knew nothing about gardening. He learned through trial and error, and the man was enthusiastic and thought big. He wanted flowers in his garden in winter, and searched until he found them. He wanted to grow mushrooms. He wanted a wood in his field. You get the idea. The writing is what makes this book. His description of the gardening books he found: "They were mostly in wrappers which showed women in obsolete hats standing with guilty expressions by the side of immense hollyhocks. They had terrible titles too..." Or perhaps about gardeners themselves, "People think that the gardener is a placid man, who chews a perpetual cud... a man whose mind moves slowly... Such ideas are very wide of the mark. A gardener is a wild and higly-strung creature, whose mind trembles like the aspen and is warped by sudden frosts and scarred by strange winds..." Well worth a winter read!

Nothing much happens in Beverly Nichols book.No sex, no crimes, just the miracle of growth,of life in a cottage garden.A witty,charming book that makes you look at your own garden with different eyes.